Shale gas boosting steel making

Bloomberg News

January 1, 2013

NEW YORK — The U.S. shale-gas revolution, which has revitalized chemicals companies and prompted talk of domestic energy self-sufficiency, is attracting a wave of investment that might revive profits in the steel industry.

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Austrian steelmaker Voestalpine said last month that it might construct a $661 million factory in the United States to benefit from cheap gas. Nucor Corp., the most valuable U.S. steelmaker, plans to start up a $750 million Louisiana project in mid-2013. They're among at least five U.S. plants under consideration or being built that would use gas instead of coal to purify iron ore, the main ingredient in steel.

“That technology has been around 30 years; but for 29 years, gas prices in the U.S. were so high that the technology was not economical,” said Michelle Applebaum, managing partner at consulting firm Steel Market Intelligence in Chicago. “This is how steel will be built moving forward.”

The new capacity could signal a turnaround for an industry that has suffered from overcapacity since the financial crisis and collapse in commodity prices four years ago.

The newest group of steel projects are so-called direct-reduced iron plants, which account for the first stage of steel making. DRI technology produces iron for about $324 a ton, Nucor said in a November presentation. That's $82 a ton, or 20 percent, cheaper than using a conventional blast furnace, the Charlotte, N.C.-based steelmaker said.

Foreign competitors now are following Nucor's lead. A joint venture between Australia's Bluescope Steel and commodity trader Cargill plans to build a DRI plant in Ohio, said Biliana Pehlivanova and Shiyang Wang, analysts at Barclays in New York. India's Essar Global Ltd. plans one for Minnesota, Barclays said.

Nucor might announce a second DRI plant as soon as this year, bringing the company's domestic iron-making capacity to 5 million tons per year, according to Aldo Mazzaferro, a steel analyst at Macquarie Capital USA Inc. in New York. Nucor agreed last month to pay Canadian energy company Encana Corp. $3 billion over two decades for a joint venture that will develop gas wells to supply its DRI capacity.

No one at BlueScope and Essar responded to messages seeking comment on the DRI projects. Lisa Clemens, a Cargill spokeswoman, declined to comment about any iron-making expansion at the company's North Star BlueScope joint venture. Katherine Miller, a Nucor spokeswoman, declined to comment about a possible second DRI plant.

Hydraulic fracturing of shale rock formations from Texas to West Virginia has boosted supplies of gas and sent prices plunging by as much as half in the past two years.

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There's no guarantee that steel demand in the U.S. will improve. Domestic steel-industry capacity utilization is at 74 percent, according to data from the American Iron and Steel Institute. Utilization was 91 percent in August 2008, the month before the bankruptcy of Lehman Brothers Holdings.